A number of features set Luis de Milán's El Maestro apart from every other contemporary book of Spanish instrumental music. This seminal collection of vihuela music was followed by five further Spanish anthologies of music for this instrument (list); it is, however, the only one not to use the popular system of Italian tablature for its musical notation. It is also the first published book of Spanish instrumental music—and quite possibly the first book of music anywhere—to provide verbal instructions to the performer regarding the tempo one should adopt for different pieces of music. But Milán's innovations are not even limited to the revolutionary concept that a musical composer should guide the performer toward an appropriate speed at which to perform a given piece of music. He translated the popularity of Italian dance music into a more native idiom, even in a piece—such as his Pavan No. 6—which claims to be modeled on a foreign melody.

Milán's sixth Pavan is the only such dance in his El Maestro in triple meter. Its regular and elegant rhythmic structure, including stylized courtly hemiolas at each major cadence, supports an origin in Italian courtly song. In addition, the sixth Pavan offers perhaps the clearest variation structure of his volume, with but three elaborated versions of the same eight-bar dance figure. Yet the composer also exerts his subtle artistic control over the same variations, working elegantly within superficially sparse textures to spin out as much varietas as possible. His principal background is a three- or four-voiced chordal texture, yet he allows ornamental running notes to pass among voices, thus propelling the audible interest throughout the sonic spectrum. Sometimes the running passages are in close imitation, sometimes they merely echo the rhythm; often the notes in one voice wittily vary the accidentals used by another, allowing the very polyphony more color. Each finger of the virtuoso lutenist takes on its own aural character.

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